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Housing Mobility and the New York Times: Not So Perfect Together

Buried inside an article in today’s NY Times about Section 8 housing is a real story. The second half of a piece by Solomon Moore, entitled “As Housing Program Moves to the Suburbs, Tensions Follow,” details anecdotes suggesting that the Antioch, CA police department has engaged in a systematic program to intimidate and evict African American tenants on the federal Section 8 program living in their community.

However, the story’s headline and the emotional thrust of it suggests that tensions in Antioch stem mainly from mistakenly allowing poor blacks to move to the suburbs, not from an abuse of power by local police or seemingly intolerant attitudes on the part of some white residents. With reference to one recent opinion article in the Atlantic Magazine, the piece seems to dismiss past social science data on reforming public housing policies away from high-rise, high-density project developments towards rental assistance for housing in neighborhoods where opportunity already exists.

Reading the piece, I wonder whether the editors of the Times have sat with tenants of Section 8 housing for any period of time. The writer appears to have attempted to cover the story of one tenant and police intimidation. However, as published, the story smacks of an article which was editorially forced into a point-counterpoint mishmash of contextual references.

Readers may want to check out other points of view about the challenge, in an era when few programs are being funded to alleviate poverty, to help poor families find opportunity.